Antimicrobial resistance as a disaster risk: a disaster studies perspective

Antibiotic resistance is usually discussed as a medical or pharmaceutical market problem. Callaghan and Dayan (2020) treat it as a disaster risk and argue that its spread reflects a failure of research and development to keep pace with that risk.

The pace at which resistance spreads is set against the pace of discovery. The article asks whether the problem is limited to pharmaceutical incentives or points to a wider failure of the global discovery system.

The article frames antibiotic resistance as a symptom of a discovery system that responds too slowly to societal research imperatives, and calls for near real-time research as part of disaster response.

Policy makers can view antibiotic resistance through a disaster risk lens rather than only through pharmaceutical market incentives, and research funders can treat the speed of discovery as part of disaster preparedness.

• Why discovery slows down: research productivity and the knowledge aggregation problem
• Collective intelligence and crowdsourced R&D for crisis research

Callaghan, C. W., & Dayan, O. (2020). Antibiotic resistance and R&D failure: The need for near real-time disaster research. Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies, 12(1), a795. https://doi.org/10.4102/jamba.v12i1.795